A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga

by Drazen, Patrick

  However, he was awoken in the middle of the night by the loudest, most frightening noises. There was shrieking and screaming, noises made by nothing human. The boy was glad he remembered the priest’s words to avoid the large, even though he also realized that he was trapped by whatever was rampaging through the temple. All he could do was sit tight and wait until morning—or until the thing found him.

  Finally, the boy could see through a crack in the door that the sun had come up. All was quiet, so he cautiously opened the door to the closet. The first thing he saw scared him almost to death, for every inch of the floor of the large room was covered with blood. A quick search of the temple showed where it had come from: the deserted temple had been invaded by a demon shaped like a rat—except that this rat was as big as an ox! What could have killed it?

  Then the boy noticed something when he looked at the cats he had drawn the day before. In every picture, the cats’ teeth and claws shone red with blood.

  The news spread quickly through the village, and the boy found out the history of the temple. He heard how the rat demon had attacked the temple years ago, killing off or driving out the priests who lived there. He heard that many brave warriors had gone to the temple to try to slay the rat demon; none of the brave warriors were ever heard from again.

  But people did hear of the boy, who grew up to become a famous artist.

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  The 11-week 2006 anime TV series Ayakashi, also known as Samurai Horror Stories, told two old and famous ghost stories and one original one. Since it had to live up to the impact of Yotsuya Kaidan and the Tenshu Monogatari, the third, original story needed to be something special. It is, in terms of both visuals and scares.

  Bake Neko (Demon Cat) was written by Michiko Yokote (a veteran of television anime from Cowboy Bebop to Naruto to xxxHolic) and directed by Kenji Nakamura, who worked as a production coordinator on projects as different as the Sailor Moon movies and the Serial Experiments Lain series. However, the impressive look of these three episodes is the work of designer Takashi Hashimoto, whose career goes back to the nineties with his work on Giant Robo, Armitage III, and Macross Plus. This time, however, the look is like nothing you’ve seen before, which in anime is saying something.

  39. “At first, I only meant to keep her a few days …”

  The story, set in the Edo period, starts as the Sakai family, prominent but cash-strapped, is about to marry off their daughter, mainly for the infusion of money from the groom’s family. As she steps over the threshold, however, the bride-to-be drops dead—and she isn’t the only one. A passing merchant, known only as the Medicine Seller, shows that he has other talents as well; to protect the Sakai family from the title demon cat which is preying on them, he scatters ofuda on all of the walls. This just buys them some time, however; before he can fight the demon, the Medicine Seller needs to know the family’s darkest secrets, to understand why the demon cat has a grudge against these people. The first explanation—that the head of the family and his son used to test newly purchased samurai swords on cats—just wasn’t convincing. As the pattern has already established, for successful exorcisms the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, must come to light; when it does, the outcome isn’t pretty.

  Twenty-five years earlier, the head of the Sakai household stole a young girl on her way to be someone else’s bride. He seduced her in a room in his estate, and, while he claimed at first that she seemed to care for him, things soon took a nasty turn. He ended up imprisoning the girl in his house, raping and abusing her at will. She refused to eat for a time, but her captors didn’t realize that she was giving her scraps of food to a kitten that was in the room with her—her only source of comfort and companionship. She ultimately died of starvation, telling the cat to escape, and find some way to avenge her.

  Which it did. The cat came back as a bakeneko, a demonic cat. It’s a creature with a long and interesting history. Some of that history appears in the Inō Mononoke scroll, a collection of folklore from the Hiroshima area. The bakeneko also appears in Shrine of the Morning Mist, a manga by Hiroki Ugawa largely inspired by the scroll; the manga/anime version of Ugawa’s bakeneko character sometimes looks human, sometimes like a cutesy feline/human hybrid (the “catgirl” of many, many manga/anime), and sometimes like a hybrid that’s far more menacing than cutesy. The bakeneko could also be confused with the seemingly similar nekomata, a kind of bakeneko; both are cat demons, but the nekomata has learned to walk upright and is noted for having two tails. In Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha, demon hunter Sango has a pet nekomata named Kirara, which turns from a cute little two-tailed kitten into a giant cat as big as a tiger, with fiery paws and the ability to fly. On a more earthy note, the Nekomata are also a low-level Yakuza (organized crime) gang in the manga/anime Gokusen.

  The Medicine Seller ultimately slays the demon cat afflicting the Sakai family, but by then they could no longer deny their sordid past, and the chambermaid Kayo, who alone seemed to have any kind of good sense, fled the house. The Medicine Seller at the end finds the corpse of an old dead cat, while the spirits of a girl and a kitten, long imprisoned in the Sakai mansion, finally reach the outside world.

  Bake Neko proved so popular that the Medicine Seller became part of a separate anime series in 2007, called Mononoke.[47] In this case, the Medicine Seller travels across Japan, getting involved in murder mysteries and in doing so encounters a variety of ghosts and demons. Once again, Michiko Yokote is the writer, Kenji Nakamura is the director, and the unique visuals are by Takashi Hashimoto. The multi-episode stories are Zashiki warashi (see chapter 17), Umibouzu, Nopperabou (the faceless ghost we encountered in the first pages of this book), Nue and Bakeneko.

  There are touches of humor among the thrills of Bake Neko, but the episodes build quickly and relentlessly in tension and pacing as we try to find out what really happened before the cat spirit takes its revenge. If it’s possible, the story feels as if it’s exceeding the speed limit—the mounting sense of terror and danger is that palpable.

  CHAPTER 16: BEYOND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

  Buddhism, as is fairly well known, allows for the migration of souls from one body to another. This isn’t limited to the same species; a soul may, in this scheme of things, be reborn from an animal to a human or vice versa. This sets one of the Rinne stories of Rumiko Takahashi in motion.

  40. I want my princess

  The ghost in this case is of a medieval Japanese warrior, decked out in the armor of the 1500s. You can tell he was killed in battle because he has arrows sticking in him. You can also tell he’s an ochimusha—a coward—because the arrows are sticking in his back. The logic is inescapable: the man was running away from the battle when he was killed.

  But that doesn’t explain why he has lingered on earth for hundreds of years. There is a bit of unfinished business: he was engaged to be married to a girl he called Hime (princess), has been waiting to find her again, and now believes that he has done so. Consequently, he’s haunting a high school student named Kaori Himekawa who he’s convinced is his one-time fiancée. He keeps appearing to her in dreams, trying to get her to drink saké as part of a Shinto wedding ceremony.

  To solve the problem, the spirit named Rinne consults an ungakyo—a mirror which shows a person’s past lives. By setting the ungakyo to 1573, the year the warrior was killed, it reveals that the student named Himekawa was at that time—a sea turtle. Checking out other members of the cast of characters in this story, Rinne examines the high school’s middle-aged, rather large nurse and finds that, on the year in question, she was a carp. Finally they locate the person who was the soldier’s beloved Hime, who is currently the boys’ physical education coach Suzuki. Not realizing he was once Hime, the coach asked the soldier, “Haven’t I met you somewhere?” The warrior’s response: “You have the wrong guy.” As the story says, after that, it didn’t take the ochimusha long to pass on; he’d put a lot of extra baggage behind him.

  xxx

  A story dating fr
om the 1600s has quite a mix of ingredients, including sacred trees and political corruption.

  41. Death by Tree

  A famous fire in 1658 destroyed one-eighth of the city of Edo, the new capital of the nation which would be called Tokyo. One nobleman, the Daimyo Lord Date Tsunamune of Sendai, had built seven houses, but lost them all in the fire.

  Lord Date Tsunamune wanted to rebuild his palaces with a splendor that would almost match the houses of the Shogun. (For obvious reasons, he couldn’t rebuild them as more splendid than the Shogun’s.) He appointed a nobleman to see to things, Harada Kai Naonori; he in turn met with a lumber broker named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon. The broker pointed out that, because of the fire, good lumber was hard to find; Harada replied that money was no object.

  Kinokuniya was only concerned about one piece of wood: a single beam cut from a camphor tree for the ceiling beam of Lord Date Tsunamune’s main house. Most of the camphor trees, however, were old and regarded as sacred. The one tree that would best suit the purpose was in the forest of Nekoma-myojin, and was the responsibility of one of the Shogun’s retainers, named Fujieda Geki. He in turn met with four local village elders and, over dinner and drinks, determined that none of the four elders could read or write. This suited Fujieda Geki. All four of the elders told Fujieda Geki that the large camphor tree in question could not be touched, but they also agreed to put their seal to whatever document Fujieda Geki wrote. And Fujieda Geki was now assured that he could write the lumber permit any way he chose, regardless of the respect and veneration in which the local people held the camphor tree.

  The next day, Kinokuniya sent a crew to the forest in question, four days travel away, with the vaguely worded permit signed by the seal of all four elders. The local caretaker questioned the four elders, who thought they had exempted the large camphor from being cut, although the permit didn’t read that way. When he realized what had happened, Hamada Tsushima, the caretaker of the camphor tree, committed suicide, stating before he did that his spirit would enter the camphor tree, so that he might have revenge on the corrupt Kinokuniya.

  Eventually the crew brought down the camphor tree, but it was difficult: the men could not move the felled tree at all, and, whenever they came close to it, the branches would lash out at their faces and bodies. The fallen tree’s branches swung so quickly and powerfully that members of the crew suffered broken limbs, and some were crushed nearly to death.

  In the middle of all this, with word spreading on the inability to take lumber from the famous camphor tree, a messenger from the Daimyo arrived, ordering the lumber crew to leave the camphor tree alone and return home; the four elders, on the other hand, were summoned to court so that they might commit suicide to atone for their foolishness.

  As for the corrupt contractor Kinokuniya, he stated that he was sick and hid in his rooms. A servant was sent to look in on him, and a barber came to see him; shortly thereafter, Kinokuniya was found dead. The head of the crew sent to harvest the camphor tree, a man named Chogoro, did penance by building a new shrine for the fallen camphor tree and hiring a new caretaker to replace Hamada Tsushima, who had committed suicide. At last report, the fallen camphor tree and its new shrine are still there.

  xxx

  Sometimes, a ghost can turn into something completely non-animal.

  42. Returning as a “Bug”

  According to a legend from the Konjaku, an epidemic struck Japan in the ninth century C.E. Everyone, from the emperor down to the common people, developed a terrible hacking cough. However, nobody knew just what it was, and everyone feared that it could turn into something lethal.

  One evening, a cook was on his way home from work; he cooked for a nobleman but did not live with him and his staff. Along the way, he met a tall and frightening nobleman, dressed in a red cloak and formal headdress. He didn’t know the dire figure, but knew enough to kneel and bow before him.

  The noble spoke: “I used to be Ban no Yoshio, a counselor who committed a serious crime against His Majesty, lost his post and died in exile.[48] In death I became a spirit of pestilence. But I still feel that I owe much to my country for the favors that I enjoyed while I was at court. I have something important to tell you.

  “Heaven had decided that there would be a dire sickness this year that would kill all who contracted it. I petitioned to have the fatal epidemic become a coughing fit instead. Please let people know that they need not be afraid.” After he had spoken, the noble spirit vanished.

  The cook did as he was asked, telling people about Ban no Yoshio and the nature of the sickness then sweeping through Japan. People were relieved that the illness was not serious, although it seemed strange that Ban no Yoshio, who certainly could have appeared to anyone, spoke to a cook.

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  Another memorable case chronicled in the Konjaku tells a cautionary tale of a hermit monk who allowed the beauties of an empress to so possess him that, at death, he immediately left human form.

  43. A Lustful Demon

  This story started with the serious illness one summer of the beautiful Somedono Empress.[49] Doctors and monks tried to heal her but failed. Finally, the emperor heard of a powerful hermit monk who lived in the Katsuragi Mountains of Yamato Province.[50] The emperor and his father-in-law summoned the monk, who no sooner started praying for the empress than one of the empress’ ladies-in-waiting began yelping, screaming, and running through the house. Finally she was cornered, and a fox crawled out of the lady’s kimono. Once the fox was captured, the empress regained her health.

  A few days later, while the hermit was still at the home of the emperor, he caught a glimpse of the empress in a light summer kimono. With this brief glimpse of feminine beauty, the hermit monk fell hopelessly in love with the empress. He rushed to embrace her, but the ladies-in-waiting sounded the alarm, and the hermit was thrown into prison. In his cell he would pray to die, be reborn as a demon, and have sex with the empress in that demonic form. The emperor banished the hermit back to his home in Yamato province, where, still consumed with desire for the empress, he starved himself for more than ten days. When he died, he changed in that instant into a demon: a monster standing eight feet tall, with black skin, eyes like brass bowls, tusks like a boar, and a bald head. He wore only a loincloth.

  This was how he appeared to the empress, as he had desired. As her ladies-in-waiting fled in terror, the empress, whose mind was turned by the demon, welcomed him into her bed. This repeated itself daily, with the demon appearing in broad daylight to be the empress’ lover, leaving only around sundown.

  The emperor called in other holy men to subdue the demon, and, for a time, it did not appear. However, one day, when it had been days since the demon had appeared, he returned as the entire court watched. He went to the empress’s bed chamber; she followed him as if the rest of the court wasn’t there; then they came out again and, as the Kojaku put it, “brazenly performed an unspeakable act.”[51]

  The moral of this story originally was that noble ladies should safeguard their virtue and not allow themselves to be approached by hermit monks. For this book, however, the point is that the spirit is very flexible after death, and one might assume any of an infinite number of shapes, not necessarily limited to humans or even animals. There are, as we shall see, even good ghosts.

  CHAPTER 17: HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS: ZASHIKI

  While some spirits—human or animal—can be malicious, others are nice and even helpful. Ghosts stay in the human world not just in order to inflict rough justice as payment for bad karma. A few ghosts even bring good luck; the trick is to recognize them as such.

  44. “Brother, poor brother”

  The Enoki family (a widower father and his two sons) are featured in Marimo Ragawa’s manga Akachan to Boku (Baby and Me). In one episode, they spend a summer weekend at an old inn complete with its own onsen (hot springs). The little old lady who runs the inn at first calls older son Takuya “Tadaomi”; we find out later it’s because he resembles an ill-fated boy by that
name who died at a young age of tuberculosis. Tadaomi’s little sister Kikuko was killed shortly thereafter when a building collapsed.

  Kikuko, however, has hung around the onsen in spirit, and at first she’s only visible to Takuya, who caught a cold and developed a fever, and his toddler brother Minoru. We’ll see a little later that (in the pop culture, anyway) ghosts can be perceived while one is undergoing surgery, suffering delirium, or otherwise detached from this world. Minoru’s case reflects the traditional Japanese belief that, between birth and age seven, a child lives partly in this world and partly in the spirit-world where the child’s soul dwelt before it was born on Earth. By age seven, the child is accepted as fully in and of this world.[52] This explains not only the very unusual things little children sometimes say and do—such as saying that they remember things that happened before they were born—but also its parallel belief that elderly people over the age of seventy begin losing their souls back to the spirit realm in preparation for death, as a way of accounting for some forms of senile dementia.

  Kikuko’s spirit is unsettling to Takuya because Kikuko herself was unsettled in life. When her brother developed tuberculosis, he knew that it was contagious and that he needed to be isolated, so Tadaomi, who previously had been kind to Kikuko, became angry and short with her, hoping that she would grow angry and leave him alone, and avoid catching the disease; in doing this, he was still being the loving big brother by looking out for her, thinking that she was still too young to understand what was happening. All this did, however, was confuse the child, who ended up both hating and loving her big brother and couldn’t reconcile the two sets of feelings. In the end, Minoru’s unfailing love for his ill big brother causes Kikuko to remember her love for her brother despite his abuse. She apologizes to Takuya, believing him to be Tadaomi; he accepts her apology by patting her on the head. In the final scene, the fever breaks, the Enoki family checks out of the inn, and Minoru happily waves goodbye to the ghost of Kikuko, presumably before she Becomes One with the Cosmos and is reunited with her beloved big brother. However, she may have another part to play, especially if she hangs around the inn as a zashiki.